


Diminishing Smile

by Quiet_Shadow



Category: Versailles no Bara | Rose of Versailles
Genre: Babies, Daughters, F/M, Family Issues, Love, Period-Typical Sexism, Pre-Series, Psychological Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 17:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15999758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quiet_Shadow/pseuds/Quiet_Shadow
Summary: With each daughter she gives to her husband, Madame de Jarjayes can see his face slowly changing, his smile disappearing...





	Diminishing Smile

**Author's Note:**

> *blinks* I can't believe I actually wrote a Lady Oscar/Rose of Versailles fic. That's really a new one for me. And it's not even Oscar or André centric, either.

When she had been but a young girl, Marguerite Emilie de Jarjayes had walked to the altar with a light heart and many hopes for the future. She had been young and beautiful and she loved and was dearly loved in return by the kind man who was to become her husband.

François Reynier de Jarjayes had had the brightest smiles for her as he took her hand and kissed it, walked by her side in the gardens of Versailles or down the paths bathed by the shadows of the trees near the Jarjayes’ ancestral house. He had swept her in a dance at each ball and he had laughed with her, free and careful whenever he wasn’t on duty, tender and loving like a young husband could be.

When had the smile started to diminish? Marguerite Emilie wasn’t totally sure.

When he had started to climb up in the hierarchy, perhaps, as more weight and responsibilities started to pill up on his shoulders, gradually changing the serious but occasionally carefree young man into a somber, determinate and sometimes harsh and hard General.

Or perhaps when, despite seeing his wife’s belly swell up with the promise of a child, God kept refusing him a son to carry on the name of the Jarjayes?

But oh, how he had smiled the first time Marguerite Emilie had been pregnant! Full of attentions, never straying far from home if he wasn’t forced to by duty, he would never have missed the birth of his firstborn for all the gold and titles of the kingdom.

He had kept that smile even as Marguerite Emilie presented him their firstborn daughter, small and delicate, already sharing the blonde curls of her mother. “It is a beautiful daughter; I thank you, ma Mie,” he had said softly as he kissed her on her forehead and took the child from her to get a better look at her, and if he had been disappointed to have a daughter instead of a son, François Reynier didn’t show it. For all the baby isn’t a girl, you can’t shake off the joy of being a father for the first time, and if François Reynier will be bound to favor a son more, he will always keep a different type of tenderness for the first of his daughters.

A firstborn is a firstborn, there’ll always be more – and there’ll be sons among them, Marguerite Emilie reasons as she approves heartily her husband’s choice of Marguerite Adélaïde for the tiny baby – who they will mostly simply call Adélaïde to differentiate her from her mother and grandmother and paternal aunt, who are also named Marguerite. She’s bright and beautiful and Marguerite Emilie couldn’t be happier.

Reynier still smiles merrily when their second daughter, Hortense Anne Elisabeth, is born on a windy November day. Still not a son, and he doesn’t quite shine with as much joy as the first time, but he still looks genuinely happy about the birth of this second daughter. “She has my mother’s eyes,” he states as he sits down by Marguerite Emilie’s side and stroke the baby girl’s chin with a finger.

“I thought she had MY mother’s eyes,” Marguerite Emilie smiles back. A newborn is a changing creature and perhaps in the end, little Hortense will look like neither of them or a mix and match of her mother and father, nobody can yet say. Her mother thinks she will be blonde too, though perhaps of a paler shade than her sister and mother’s own hair.

She doesn’t say ‘sorry’ for not giving him a son, not yet. They’ve been married for five years and she had given him two children already, but Marguerite Emilie is still young, so very young and hopeful that the next time, she’ll give Reynier the son he’s expecting so much. Daughters have their use too, to make good alliances, and two daughters aren’t a burden for them.  
Sophie Victoire Emilie isn’t the promised son, and this time she doesn’t think her imagination is playing tricks on her when the General’s smile doesn’t seem to be as bright as usual. Marguerite Emilie nervously plays with a handkerchief she almost rips in two as Reynier just stand over the cradle and look down at the sleeping baby. She’s a quiet one, little Sophie, unlike Adélaïde who had screamed with all the force of her little lungs or Hortense, who had never seemed to stop making little noises.

Reynier has yet to take her in his arms, she notices, and it makes something swell up in her chest, something painful she’s not sure how to handle.

“I am sorry,” Marguerite Emilie says for the first time (and not the last, oh no, not the last) and Reynier quickly leaves the infant’s side to kneel by her bedside.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” Reynier says frantically. “It was God’s will to gift us with a third daughter. Perhaps He has decided that I needed more beauties in my life to compensate for the violence and horrors of war,” he offers. Marguerite Emilie tries to smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes, just like Reynier’s smile feels a little too forced to be honest. They console themselves and each other by pointing out little things – Sophie will most likely be a brunet like her father, she has her mother’s smile, Adélaïde and Hortense will have a new playmate…

She’s still not a son, and it’s starting to weigh heavily on Lady de Jarjayes’ mind. Sometimes, as her maids help her dress or undress, she looks at herself in the mirror, looks at that belly that keep swelling but refuses to deliver a boy in the end and wonders if she’s doing something wrong or if perhaps she offended God in some way. If so, she repents, she repents with all her soul; she wants to give Reynier a son, the son he wants so much.

She starts listening in to other Ladies at Court, hearing tips from women who only ever had sons on how to make sure the next child will be one. She goes to see herbalists, takes potions every day. Surely, it will work?

Joséphine Marie Louise’s birth makes her feel as if someone had punched her in the guts. Marguerite Emilie doesn’t cry and she can even smile because the child is healthy, albeit a little small, and she already loves this little girl, her fourth daughter, but part of her heart remains heavy. All the advices she received, all the medicines she took were for naught.

All of her husband’s hopes were crushed once more.

“I’m…”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” her husband says, and this time his smile is thin and it makes Lady Jarjayes want to weep. She truly wanted to bring him true joy and for few months, she had; they had both been so certain it would be a son, finally, THE son. “We still have time for another child,” he adds after a moment of silence.

Marguerite Emilie doesn’t reply. They have been married for almost twelve years by now, and there is slightly larger age gap between Sophie and Joséphine than between the others. Marguerite Emilie doesn’t feel old, but four maternities are starting to affect her body, even if she’s still hale and young enough to give pregnancy another try or two or three if she must. So long the doctors doesn’t forbid her to, she can still try to give Reynier other children – she can still try to make him smile like he did, once upon a time.  
She just has to make sure the next baby is a boy.

She goes to church again and prays with a rare devotion, offers money to various churches and parishes, drink potions again, listen to different tips since the first ones didn’t work. Marguerite Emilie has doubt it will work, especially when it takes nearly four years before she can feel the kick of a child in her belly again, but perhaps God had decided to answer her prayers, this time?

The Jarjayes’ fifth daughter is christened Henriette Charlotte soon after birth. She’s small and thin and she barely makes any noise and the priest and the doctor aren’t certain she will lives long, thus why the christening is make in due haste, least the child be condemned to the Limbos should she passes on. Marguerite Emilie can’t even go to hold her to receive the baptism; the birth took a lot out of her, more so than any of her other children, the labor stretching almost the whole day due to the newborn being badly placed in the womb.

Marguerite Emilie keeps jerking awake in the dark, heart beating frantically as she listens to the small, quiet respirations of her baby, the crushing fear she’d die while she, her mother, is asleep troubling her rest.

“She won’t die,” Reynier says with fervor before he leaves for Versailles – fragile baby or not, it’s still a girl. Marguerite Emilie has no doubt he’ll grown to love her like he loves all his daughters, but since it isn’t a son and that his wife has regained her health, he can’t keep away longer (or isn’t willing to, Marguerite Emilie isn’t certain anymore; he certainly didn’t smile at all when Grand-Mère told him it was another girl, according to the whispers of the maids, and some said he actually threw a glass in a fit of temper. Marguerite Emile doesn’t want to believe it, but she also knows her husband has a temper and that being thwarted in his latest attempt to have a male heir must have been hard to swallow, even more so when he was told how draining the birth had been on his wife). “She’s a Jarjayes; she’s strong. You’ll see.”

And indeed he’s right; Henriette doesn’t die, though she remains pale and fragile and prompt to fall sick more often than all her sisters put together. Marguerite Emilie fusses over her a lot; never before had she been so close to lose a child.

“I don’t want her to be the first,” she confides in her husband as they lie together in bed one night. Almost all the women Marguerite Emilie knows have lost at least one child; some had miscarriages, other delivered stillborns children, other still lost them to illness or injuries. She’s lucky; all of her pregnancies went well and the delivery of Henriette asides, she never felt any ill-effect, and her daughters were healthy and strong but for the last one, who brought her so much worry.

“She won’t be,” Reynier answers as he kisses her in the neck (and he’s right, oh he’s painfully right, because they’ll lose their sixth child before then). His hand strays near her tight and Marguerite Emilie hesitates to stop him.

The doctors haven’t forbidden her to try for another child, but they HAD advised she waits longer before she had another. She’s nowhere near as young as she once was; she needs rest and time for her body to get back into shape.

But Reynier is here and he’s gone so often those days and they still need a son to carry the name and inherit the titles and the fortune and the land and she can’t bring herself to say ‘no’. She doesn’t want him to distance himself from her, which she always fears he’ll do now that his smile has almost entirely disappeared.

And… she doesn’t want to lose his love.

It is a fool idea, of course; never once has her husband strayed away from her, and Marguerite Emilie knows he could – or perhaps, should. She may have failed to give him a son (yet, yet!) but surely, a lover might be able to? 

And it hurts, oh it hurts so much to think so, but for want to a son, what man wouldn’t betray his marriage vows? Her husband, Marguerite Emilie realizes with emotion, fear and relief mixed together as she timidly rises up the idea and her husband snaps at her he won’t ever be caught being unfaithful, for he had sworn so in front of God and men.

She cries a lot that night, that night she’s certain their sixth child is conceived. She cries from joy and from love and Reynier cries with her.

“I love you,” he keeps saying.

She won’t ever doubt it. She loves him too.

She loves him even though she shares her daughters, her maids and Grand-Mère’s horror when Reynier decides that enough is enough and that no matter what, his sixth child is a boy – no matter her sex. He decides the baby’s name right away, without asking Marguerite Emilie’s advice, something he never, ever did. But it’s his ‘son’, he has more right to name ‘him’ than the mother, or so he claims.

He smiles, but his smile has a strained quality Marguerite Emilie never saw before and that makes her both sad and wary even as she bows to his wish and accept to name her sixth daughter Oscar François and to raise her as a boy, hiding the truth of the infant’s sex from everyone.

It’s such a curious name, Oscar François. Well, not François, for it is a traditional name in the Jarjayes’ family (and if she had been able to choose, perhaps Marguerite Emilie would have called the baby Françoise, yes, perhaps). Oscar is more uncommon and Marguerite Emilie doesn’t think she has ever met a man with the name. But it is a very popular name in Sweden, from what the Court’s whispers tell her, and Reynier has been reading the works of a lot of Swedish authors recently, despite his lack of fondness for reading.

Oscar François is a pretty baby, perhaps the prettiest of her daughters, Marguerite Emilie thinks as she rocks the infant against her chest, mind in turmoil whenever she thinks about the potential fate of her child too hard.

What kind of life can have a girl forced to be the boy her father was unable to have?

Reynier has make no secret he always expected sons of him to follow his footsteps – the footsteps of several generations of Jarjayes, really – into the military. God Almighty, how could a girl survive fights and battles and war and…?

She doesn’t throw up, but it’s a near thing.

“Are we really going to let him, Mother?” Marguerite Adélaïde asks worriedly once, just after a ball the General saw fit to organize to celebrate the birth of his ‘male heir’. She’s the only one of her daughters to ask, but then again, as the oldest, she has a better grasp on the implications than her sisters.

Marguerite Emilie squeezes her daughter’s hand with a pale smile. “Can we do anything else?” Reynier is the man of the house, he has the ultimate power; his wife and daughters must bow to his wishes, and the servants even more (it doesn’t stop Grand-Mère to wail and rage at the injustice of it all).

“It’s not fair,” Hortense says as well as she frowns at Oscar, asleep in her cradle.

“Life isn’t always,” her mother answers, and she truly thinks so. Hortense isn’t impressed with her answer at all, but what else can Marguerite Emilie say?  
“But surely he’ll change his mind?” Sophie asks rather naively, when Oscar starts to toddle around. She cries as she does so, because her father screamed at her for calling Oscar a ‘she’ instead of a ‘he’. It was an innocent slip of the tongue, Sophie is usually more careful than that when her father is around.

“Maybe he will,” her mother reassures her, but she doesn’t believe in her own words. Régnier rarely changes his mind once he has decided something.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if we had a true brother?” Joséphine asks with a frown, because she understands and she doesn’t understand at all why Oscar has to be a boy when she doesn’t have ‘boy parts’. Oscar is running around wearing a dress, but it’s alright for now, all children under six wears dresses, and part of Marguerite Emilie’s mind weep at the thought it might be the only ones her sixth daughter will ever be allowed to wear.

“It would,” Marguerite Emilie acknowledges sadly, “but you won’t.”

And she tried, she really tried. If she could give Reynier a seventh child, a true son this time, then Oscar wouldn’t be forced to be what she wasn’t.

It had almost worked, too – she had felt the signs she was with child once more and she had been happy, so happy… Then the signs had stopped, and she had bled and cried in her sick bed as the family doctor, grim faced, let her known she had lost the baby and that trying for another would not only be inadvisable but also dangerous.

_(“Was it a son? Please, doctor, tell me the truth; was it a son?”  
“… It was too early to tell, Madame. I’m sorry.)_

Perhaps, if she had been braver, Marguerite Emilie would have tried anyway. Risk her life and try for a son once more, so her husband would relent and stop trying to raise their child against what Nature had made her.

But…

She has children to think about. She has Marguerite Adélaïde, who is old enough to start attending the Court. She has Hortense Anne Elisabeth, who has a touch of her father’s temper and an insatiable curiosity. She has Sophie Victoire Emilie, who has just discovered her passion for music and keeps begging for more lessons. She has Joséphine Marie Louise, who is a bit of a airhead and tries to bring home every stray cat she finds. She has Henriette Charlotte, whose health remains always so delicate and that the Jarjayes are thinking more and more about sending South, where the warmer climate might makes her some good.

And she has Oscar François, her daughter, her son, who needs a mother’s touch to temperate her father’s rougher edges and who will need guidance to balance out what she is and what her father wants her to be. Or has Reynier forgotten that when a girl grows up come the time of the blood, and what will he tell his son then?

Maybe Marguerite Emilie is a coward, not opposing herself to her husband’s decisions (but she is a good wife, following her husband’s wishes and lead). Perhaps she is weak, not wanting to lay her life on the line with a new pregnancy that could kill her (but strong, oh so strong for having knowingly made the choice despite her heart’s wishes).

Perhaps she will regret it all someday (she already does, because her hands itch to make dresses for her latest daughter like she did for all her sisters).

But as she sits in her chair, embroidery work in her laps and her children gathered around her, all alive and happy and innocent, her five daughters and her son, her precious Oscar who soon will be old enough to ‘pass to the men’ for ‘his’ education, when she sees her husband who watches them all with a smile, a true smile Marguerite Emilie couldn’t remember seeing since the early days of her marriage…

Well, regret and guilt don’t weigh so heavily on her mind anymore.

****

End

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-wise, I'm not sure anymore if Oscar was the fifth or the sixth daughter, because I've heard both version. We definitely see four girls in the house when she's born, but that doesn't change the fact the series or at least the summaries I read said sixth. So I went with Oscar having five sisters.


End file.
